Jerry Neumann

Reaction Wheel (reactionwheel.net) is the personal blog of Jerry Neumann, carrying the tagline "helping the workers own the means of production since 1997." It publishes essays and commentary on venture capital, angel investing, entrepreneurship, innovation, uncertainty, power laws, economics and financial markets, alongside occasional posts on teaching and coding projects. Content is organized into categories such as Advertising, Angel Investing, Economics, Innovation, Power Laws, Startup Economy, Teaching, Uncertainty and VC, and readers can follow via RSS or an email subscription list that the site reports has roughly 2,570 subscribers.

The site is run on WordPress and succeeded an earlier Blogspot blog at reactionwheel.blogspot.com, which Neumann announced in September 2020 he was moving to his own domain because of frustrations embedding non-standard content. Earlier posts on the predecessor blog included data analyses of ad-technology venture investing by category, region and round, using a self-compiled list of roughly 500 venture-funded adtech companies combined with Crunchbase data.

According to the site's About page, Neumann's day job was investing in early-stage companies through Neu Venture Capital; he co-wrote the book "Founder vs. Investor" with Liz Zalman, taught entrepreneurship at Columbia University's engineering school for 15 years, co-founded the venture-backed startup Root Markets, ran Omnicom Group's venture capital division in the 1990s, and earlier worked as a hardware design engineer on IBM's S/390 mainframe series. A recent post states that he is no longer investing in new companies.

Traction

The site reports approximately 2,570 email subscribers. Neumann's essay "We Have Learned Nothing," arguing that 25 years of startup punditry has not made entrepreneurs more likely to succeed, was published by Colossus magazine in March 2026 and generated substantial reader reaction, which he addressed in a follow-up post. He has also appeared on the Invest Like the Best podcast hosted by Patrick O'Shaughnessy.

Latest developments

Recent posts include "Reactions to 'We Have Learned Nothing'," "The Monoculture of Startup Methods," "The Prospect of AGI," a remembrance of Felice Kincannon, and "How to Invest in AI." A post states that Neumann is no longer investing in new companies. In March 2026, Colossus published his essay "We Have Learned Nothing," which argues that widely adopted startup methods such as customer development, the Lean Startup, the Business Model Canvas, design thinking and effectuation have not functioned as a working science of entrepreneurship, in part because widely known methods cause founders to converge on the same undifferentiated answers.